Money, Mission Skew Rankings

Uconn Scores Well, But Public Schools Have A Hard Time Staying With Private Universities

August 23, 2007|By Robert M. Thorson Robert M. Thorson is a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a member of The Courant's Place Board of Contributors. His column appears every Thursday. He can be reached at profthorson@hotmail.com.

The University of Connecticut is justifiably proud of being named ``The Top-Ranked Public University in New England,'' by U.S. News & World Report. This is great news for every state taxpayer, especially those like me who work there. On closer inspection, this delicious sounding statement is twice-qualified, first for school type and second for geography.

With both qualifiers, UConn comes out securely on top. With only the first qualifier, based on ``type of school,'' UConn ranks within the top 25 national public universities. With no qualifiers, UConn is in a three-way tie for 64th place among national universities. The bad feeling I get from this last number comes from the unfair apples-to-oranges comparison between public and private universities.

Every single one of the top 10 highest-ranked universities -- Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, U-Penn, Cal Tech, MIT, Duke, Columbia and Chicago -- are private, elite institutions with enormous endowments. The highest-ranked public national university in the nation -- the University of California, Berkeley -- doesn't even make the top 20. We're not talking brains here. We're talking the M & Ms -- mission and money.

The fundamental mission of a private university is to be the best university it can be. Period. The fundamental mission of a public university -- especially a land-grant school such as UConn -- is to serve the public interest. What UConn does so admirably well is to juggle two enormous balls at once, that of being excellent and that of serving the stressed-out taxpayers who fund it. Private universities don't have that constraint. Like the Vatican, they are located in a state but are not of the state.

The other M & M is money, which is responsible for buying much, but certainly not all of that quality. Based on a recent analysis from ``Inside Higher Ed,'' (an industry watch group), the average rate of return for private university endowment investments was 9.3 percent, well above the market average. The previous year was even better, averaging 15.1 percent. According to the report, ``there was a direct correlation between size of endowment and rate of return.'' In other words, the richest private universities are getting richer, even as the middle-class taxpayers who support public higher education are being squeezed harder.

The growth of Harvard's endowment in 2005 alone was larger than the total endowment of the University of Virginia, the public school to which the University of Connecticut looks up to in the rankings. This financial imbalance applies to elite liberal arts colleges as well. Top-ranked Williams College has an endowment larger than the total of the 10 highest endowments for historically black colleges. Williams and Harvard are clearly very good at what they do, but that is not the issue.

The geography qualifier also obscures a few interesting facts. California has six public universities ranked more highly than the University of Connecticut.

Why? It's principally because California's population and geographic area are both more than 10 times larger than Connecticut's. Based simply on the ratio between population and U.S. News ranking, Connecticut outdoes California. Vermont, with its mouse-sized population, is a standout, whereas Florida, with its elephant-sized population (California is a whale), has only one national university ranked within the top 100.

I'll end with what I found most interesting about this year's rankings. Within the top 25 liberal arts college there are actually two public schools, both federally funded military academies. They were included for the first time this year because the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently re-classified them.

Discovering this curious fact made me wonder about our national priorities. The question is not why the U.S. funds elite military colleges to train warriors. The question is why federal money is not used to fund other types of elite colleges also in the national interest. Surely an elite college of diplomacy would quickly pay for itself by helping the U.S. get out of military quagmires that require such elite officers.

In my dreams, we will someday be comparing elite federally funded liberal arts colleges with each other. That would make far more sense to me than comparing taxpayer-funded universities with wealthy private ones.